Fun With Statistics
When you hear people talking about money you have to watch the words that they use. One of the most important ways to “lie” about income is to convince people that “median” and “average” mean the same thing, and they most definitely do not.
If you have a company where 100 people make $10/hour, 5 people make $20/hour, one makes $40/hour, and the CEO makes $500/hour, the median income is $10/hour while the average income is $15.33/hour. Note that only seven of 107 people in the company make at least the average income.
When someone like Wal-Mart tells the world that the average salary for their company is $19,000/year, they don’t say how many of their employees actually make that much money. When the top salaries in a corporation are measured in hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, the average can rise remarkably.
I was going to leave this as a comment over at Jo Fish’s Democratic Veteran, but his software has decided I’m a spammer if I post an extended comment.
